JA - you asked for more about Walter Kling. As I’ve mentioned here, Thiel Audio grew out of an intentional community and its wish to employ ourselves in a mutual undertaking. Besides myself with my wife and toddler daughter, there were my brother Jim and his girlfriend as well as Jim’s school-friend Walter Kling and my fellow Marianist Brother friend Fred Collopy. I had established some viability as a designing craftsman and included Walter in our Conceptions Design Studio. Kathy took on Marketing and relationship-development. Fred was a very early computer pioneer - everything about computers was pretty new in the late 70s. Fred signed up for business development. He later went on for a masters from Wharton in Decision Science and a PhD in Entrepreneurial Development. Walter was a multi-talented artist-craftsman with proficiency as a painter, potter and sculptor. He later went on for a degree in Architecture and practiced that until I wooed him back to Thiel Audio.
Of note is that none of us would have signed up to attempt Thiel Audio without the group commitment to combine all talents and risks for the common goal. We were in our 20s, and along with enthusiasm, change is what happens at that phase. Fred gravitated toward his advanced education and we all absorbed his roles, more or less. But his talents and inputs would have been more than welcome. Walter’s wife had left him with two young children, Jeremy and Jennifer. About 5 years in, he ran afoul of Jim’s alpha-male requirements. His departure, around 1980, was devastating, especially for me. We were moving out of our farmhouse beginnings to our "real" industrial space - a time when Walt’s forté of fixtures, tools and methods were needed. That all fell to me in addition to my teaching-training-coaching - process development responsibilities. It’s hard to overstate how much and how varied is the work required to push the limits, to try the untried and grow a company without outside capital or resources. Jim was an extraordinary designer, but those designs must be implemented in effective and reliable ways, every day, all day. Walter was part of that equation and his absence nearly cost us our company. One hundred hour weeks became the norm.
Around 1987 we expanded from around 5000 square feet to 15,000 square feet including moving everything while adding new capabilities and doubling capacity, all without missing a day’s work. I was able to hire Walter as construction manager for the physical plant part where I took on the logistics, project management and production design part. It worked. (Rob Gillum came on in that expansion as a young rookie and spent his working life in most of the aspects of manufacturing.) The next few years included cementing Walter back into the company, where he remained until Jim’s death in 2009.
Companies prune their PR around the story they want to tell. You’ve rightly heard a lot about Jim, but there was a strong team around him making the whole thing work. Walter was a central player on that team.
